Levels of Cognition
Plato – the journey from the shadows to the sun is an ascent through levels of cognition from instincts and desires at the level of immediacy up to reason and intellect.
The distinction between democracy of opinion and democracy of function remodels politics according to levels of cognition – ranging from egoistic instinct, desire, wants in the short term to altruistic common wisdom in the long run – with traditional left-right divisions ranged according to these levels;
The idea of democracy and freedom as individual liberty, opinion and choice traps individuals on the lowest rung of the levels of cognition, restricting people to the immediacy of appetite and desire and effectively promoting what Aristotle condemned as licence in the place of liberty. This is an illusory freedom and democracy.
If freedom is limited to the satisfaction of desires – as it is in Hobbes and the individualist tradition – then human beings remain enslaved to impulse. They continue to mistake the shadows for true reality, they remain subject to the manipulation of the opinion formers, the puppeteer/rulers.
For Spinoza, ‘the more man is guided by reason, the more he is free’.
Freedom is achieved by ascending to the higher levels of cognition, overcoming the passions to achieve understanding of the world and one’s place in it.
To be free, according to the individualist tradition, is to do what one wants. The point is that the individual here is not free but is subject to desires and impulses that are mechanically or physiologically determined.
The rationalist position affirms a positive conception of freedom as the creative realisation of the rational human essence achieved by ascending the levels of cognition from the limited freedom of appetite and desire to the true and full freedom of reason.